Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

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In any event, I've decided to read one of her books every year, maybe as a hope for an extension of my life. You can change your nationality by the stroke of a notary’s pen, you can enjoy two nationalities at the same time or find your nationality altered for you, overnight, by statesmen far away. There’s a drifting, meandering calmness to Morris’s writing that fits with the drifting, meandering spirit she felt Trieste has. In those moments, Morris said the city appeared clearly to her and stirred up feelings of hiraeth, a “sweet melancholy [that] illustrates not just my adolescent emotions of the past, but my lifelong preoccupations, too. You can change your nationality by the stroke of a notary's pen; you can enjoy two nationalities at the same time or find your nationality altered for you, overnight, by statesmen far away.

Here, her thoughts on a host of subjects - ships, cities, cats, sex, nationalism, Jewishness, civility and kindness - are inspired by the presence of Trieste, and recorded in or between the lines of this book. She was also the author of six books about cities and countries, two autobiographical books, several volumes of collected travel essays and the unclassifiable Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere . The final part of that second sentence made me think of Shamima Begum, the teenager from Bethnal Green in London who travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State/Daesh and who subsequently had her British citizenship, one of six types of British nationality recognised by the UK Government, stripped from her. A hundred years ago, Trieste was one of the most bustling ports in Europe but is now largely forgotten, even by Italians: though Trieste is the capital of the Italian province also named Trieste, 70 percent of Italians polled in 1999 didn’t even know it was in Italy! Morris uses the Welsh word hiraeth, a deep-seated yearning for home, similar to the German heimat, as talked about by Paul Scraton in Ghosts on the Shore, but not quite the same.But there is material enough in Morris’ book, questions unanswered and sites unseen, to justify future trips, many more of them, to Trieste.

She provides Trieste’s history in a gently teasing way, as though the place itself is a friend to her.Obviously an Italian officer, when they occupied Trieste, released his anger and sadness cutting the edge of the medal, with a knife or bayonette.